OUR BEST FRIENDS

Tag: sperm

It’s a well-known but little publicized fact that some dogs competing at Westminster and in many other dog shows aren’t brought into the world in a 100 percent natural way.

Since the 1960s, breeders have been harvesting semen from male purebreds — one technique for which is demonstrated in the video above — and inserting it into females in hopes of creating champions.

The American Kennel Club, though it doesn’t allow cloned dogs to participate in the dog shows it sanctions, has no problem with permitting those who are products of artificial insemination.

Over the decades, as with artificial insemination in humans, the technology has progressed and become widely accepted. (My view is, if we are going to widely accept something, we shouldn’t balk at watching it.)

While some human, uh, effort is involved in the semen-gathering method depicted above, more state of the art techniques involve artificial vaginas and electro-stimulation. Even today though, to get the canine juices flowing, breeders commonly use a female dog in heat, parading her in front of the male. She’s referred to as a “teaser bitch.”

Breeders say practicing artificial insemination can help improve the quality of breeds. For sure, it gives them more control, allowing them to overcome logistical obstacles, such as when a male and female are living on opposite ends of the country. They can still have a long distance relationship, so to speak.

It allows a champion male to breed with many more females than would be physically possible through traditional one-on-one mating. It allows older male dogs to continue reproducing after they can no longer mount a female. And it allows a male dog to keep producing offspring long after his death, which is the case with a champion Old English sheep dog named Yoshi.

Yoshi, under his registered name, Lambluv Desert Dancer, won more best in shows than any other sheep dog. He won Best of Breed at Westminster three times, most recently in 1999. He died in 2006, but he could still be daddy to more than 100 future litters.

“I have about 100 straws,” his owner Jere Marder told Bloomberg.com, in reference to the frozen semen samples from Yoshi she has in storage.

No product of artificial insemination has won at Westminster, but last year’s runner up in Best in Breed was a dog created with 17-year-old sperm from one of Lambluv’s sheep dogs.

“Most serious breeders that I know of have something in store,” says Marder, who owns Lambluv Old English Sheepdogs. “If anything, it’s just a precaution; otherwise, if anything happens to your champion dog before you can breed him, you’re out a good chunk of money.”

“It’s definitely a market — and one that’s growing,” said Randall Popkin, owner of the California-based Breeder’s Veterinary Services, which has been storing frozen semen and inseminating dogs with it since 1984.

“When I first started, few breeders were doing this,” he said. “Nowadays, you travel to dog shows and there’ll be three companies there offering to freeze your dog’s semen.”

According to the American Kennel Club, the number of registered purebred litters conceived with frozen semen has risen by 26 percent over the past decade. In 2013, the year for which the most recent data is available, the AKC registered about 2,200 litters that were produced via artificial insemination. That’s about 1 percent of all AKC-approved litters.

The Bloomberg article notes there are downsides.

In 2009, a Pembroke Welsh corgi breeder sued an animal hospital after her dog was allegedly accidentally inseminated with sperm from a Great Pyrenees — a breed roughly five times her dog’s size. The corgi nearly died giving birth.

In addition, there have been lawsuits over samples that were damaged during shipping or produced puppies that didn’t look purebred. In 2012, a jury awarded $200,000 to a Pennsylvania breeder who had sued a veterinary hospital for accidentally defrosting more than 100 samples from her champion poodles.

Marder, who sat out Westminster this year, says she’d love to see one of dead Yoshi’s offspring win there someday. Doing so, the article said “feels to her as if she’s keeping her old dogs alive.”

When Karen and Anthony Scully filed for divorce, determining custody of the six dogs wasn’t too difficult. He got four, she got two. The sticking point came later — with a feud, still going on five years later, over who should get the dogs’ semen.

The matter – or perhaps issue is a better word — landed before Family Court Judge Cheryl Matthews Wednesday morning.

Karen Scully, who lives in Florida, and her ex-husband, Anthony Scully of Oakland County, Michigan, are feuding in Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac over who has the legal right to the semen belonging to Cyrus, Regg and Romeo, all AKC-registered bullmastiffs.

Bull mastiff pups fetch $2,000 each in the marketplace.

The Scullys were hobby breeders in Oakland County until their divorce in 2002, and they had banked sperm from their mastiffs in a freezing center in Sterling Heights. Both still raise bullmastiffs.

Anthony Scully, through his attorney, said the semen is his — or rather, is property that should belong to him — and that his ex-wife, in moving to Florida, gave up claim. Karen Scully, who appeared in court via teleconference, claimed she has ownership, since the dogs that provided the semen once belonged to her.

Judge Matthews said she thought the case was a prank at first. “I asked, ‘Am I Being Punk’d … Is this a Candid Camera thing?” she said.

Matthews ruled that it was not a divorce matter and told the couple they would have to fight it out in civil court, according to an article in the Detroit Free Press.

The case has been assigned to Oakland County Circuit Judge Leo Bowman.